


Kismet, beloved.

by The Kat Valentine (Defenestratio)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alana Bloom Is A Dad, F/F, How many times can I recount Mason's death, Infant Death, Margot Is Charming As Hell, Marlana - Freeform, RIOT OF LILACS IN THE SPRING
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-08-26
Packaged: 2018-08-11 02:26:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7872439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defenestratio/pseuds/The%20Kat%20Valentine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She'd looked at her just once and known it was to be something preordained, a fate destiny had decided on without her permission. In comparison to that, to the truth of love, murder seemed menial, a small and useless thing beside the body of the son they had lost. Margot Verger and Alana Bloom rebuild what's been taken from them. Kismet, beloved. It was meant to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kismet, beloved.

They're sitting on the floor and Margot's frozen in shutdown mode. Alana has to drag her out of it sometimes, has learned to bring her back slow and steady, like a flare she can focus on in the dark of her own self. The decanter of whiskey is between them and Mason's in the cold, wet earth, a feigned three ring circus that went off without a hitch. Alana closes her eyes and sees Margot's desperation, hears it in her voice, and remembers the sight of what would've been their son perfect and full, ten fingers, ten toes, no heartbeat, no breath.  
  
Alana keeps her eyes open, and they stay trained on Margot.  
  
"Are you tired yet?" She asks. They're both tired. They've been tired for days. Ritualistically, they've both been drinking just as long. Falling asleep to drowsy alcohol to wake up in tandem hangovers. This, too, is a raw ache.  
  
"No. But you shouldn't drink so much. It reacts badly with your medication," Margot takes Alana's glass and knocks back the amber liquid therein. Alana will never tell her she doesn't like whiskey. But now, nothing tastes like it should be liked.  
  
(She remembers her painted red nails digging tight into the fleshy tissue of Mason's face. She remembers digging in harder when he struggled. It wasn't to secure his drowning. She could imagine Margot there, stricken vulnerable beneath the cruel whip of his sadistic desire, and when she thought about how he struggled she wanted to teach him that cold stab of helpless panic. She wanted to let him feel what it was to be out of control. To be powerless. She would've stripped him of everything. She would've been unkind, cruel, vicious. She would've humiliated him if she had the chance. Death seemed too kind. It still does.)  
  
"I'm indulging a self destructive behavior, Margot," Alana says, and takes her glass from her hands, briefly tugs it back. The crystal's cold between her palms, and she pours another mouthful as weary green eyes watch her with subdued disdain. The Verger heiress restrains her emotions professionally, flawlessly keeps them down. But there's always this hard sparkle of frustration when she's defied. She often just counts on Alana taking it in, reading the nonverbal cue. This time, she does not, "Let me for a little while. By now, I deserve at least that much."  
  
Margot leans forward and presses her lips hungrily to Alana's wolffish, cherry mouth. Her fingers tangle hard into those dark curls, undone by the end of the day. She slides a knee between her thighs and bruises her mouth with the force of every desperate kiss. Alana can't keep destroying herself if the only thing she's drinking is Margot Verger's oxygen, and every touch is slow, dizzy, clumsy yet controlled. Alana said once that funerals always make people want to have sex. They both know it's that, and then some.  
  
This brings nothing back, but it resuscitates something that stopped breathing for just a little while. 

* * *

 

"You don't have to do this."  
  
This feels like the hundredth time Margot has said it. 'You don't have to do this'. Like Alana is choosing to stab herself. Or like she's choosing to give up something-- to donate a kidney for a better cause. 'You don't have to do this'. Like the option she's opting for isn't having the child of the woman she loves (she figured it out with Mason's head underwater. It wasn't the most romantic declaration, but halfway through the floundering chaos, Alana really did learn it-- really did understand with clarity like a gunshot ringing in a little, hollow room. Really did realize this was more than getting Margot out.) 'You don't have to do this'. Like it's a burden.  
  
"I'm not obligated to do anything," Alana says calmly. She's looking right into those bewitching green eyes, blessed with an infinite calm, "it doesn't mean I don't want to do it."  
  
"I don't want you to make this decision unless you're certain."  
  
"Are people ever really certain about child-rearing?"  
  
"Alana."  
  
She knows that tone. It's the 'don't deflect' voice. It's the 'I know you better' voice. It's the 'don't do this to be a selfless person' voice.  
  
And she isn't. Well, she is, but she isn't. She has her own selfish reasons. (They'll come to fruition later. Right now, there's a decision to be had.)  
  
"I want to have your child," she stays on it for a long, quiet moment. Her eyebrows raise and she finds herself forming words slowly-- pursing around a mouth with no pretense, no lipstick. The honesty of her, a complete lack of makeup. Margot remembers the first time she saw her in the morning light, sans eyeliner, lipstick. She almost couldn't touch her. She didn't seem real. Not until Alana had brushed her fingertips with her lips, ducked her head to kiss a naked shoulder, to touch scar tissue reverently in prayer. So Alana keeps on, "I want to do this for you as well as myself. I love you, and I want to have your child. I suppose you can say it's a sense of-- maternal desire, particular attachment. Now that it's in discussion. I want to carry what's yours and mine in conjunction."  
  
She never mentions Mason once. Alana doesn't know much about genes, but she knows half of what was Mason was Margot. She knows a split creates two embryo in the womb, makes two people beside one another. Margot is half that equation. Beautiful Margot and her gentle hands, her warm voice, her soft mouth. Easily tender, terrifically stern. Margot is a juxtaposition of traits and some only Alana has had the privilege to witness.  
  
The money doesn't interest Alana. As an afterthought, it's attractive, but she's never been one for avarice. She likes indulgences-- the esteemed Doctor Bloom enjoys expensive perfume, designer patterns, a very good pair of boots-- but excess has never been a necessity. Especially not when she'd had a childhood where she'd had so little to speak of, had learned to live scarcely and frugally.  
  
Excess has its temptations, but this moment is worth more to her than the Verger bank account.  
  
Margot nods, sedate, and strokes a thumb along Alana's knuckles. She shivers at the motion-- at how strangely intimate it feels, "Only if you can promise me you're absolutely positive."  
  
"I am," she turns her palm over so Margot can touch, can circle lazily over the heel of her hand, "I'm positive. I want to spend my life with you. I want to have a family with you.  I wasn't even this sure of my doctorate. I'm so sure of this, and more than anything, of having this with you."  
  
Something unfamiliar curves Margot's mouth upward. She ducks in, and presses a kiss to Alana's forehead in a moment that lingers and edges more strongly on affectionate.  
  
"You'll make me sentimental. And I only just applied my mascara," the heiress says. The heiress who, Alana thinks, will finally inherit what she deserves.

* * *

 

"You're afraid," Margot says it the way she says all things. Calm facts, even, a day of smooth and heedless sailing. Alana's lying in bed beside her-- it's been exactly four weeks since they've learned there's a someone in there. But Alana keeps glancing up with silver-blue eyes each time Margot's palm passes over the bare skin of her torso, short nails pricking hypnotic patterns around the beginnings of a minuscule, not-yet-there bump.  
  
"Absolutely not," Alana lies, and her voice doesn't betray it, but the tell-tale twitch at her eyebrow does. She lies with extraordinary skill-- the best liar of them, in fact, though Margot affects falsity with a circus flair Alana admires. Alana's lies are smooth, flat. They register nowhere.  
  
But sometimes just at her eyebrow.  
  
"Mm-mm. Bad girl, we don't lie to me," Margot says, her tone a playful, musical excuse for scolding. The room is warm in spite of the chill outside, the blankets over them both heavy. Alana shakes her head again, like this will make it truer. And that scold turns to something hard, as immovable as the Egyptian pyramids, "I believe we swore honesty and communication were the foundations of this situation. Don't disappoint me."  
  
"I just don't want to fail you."  
  
It blurts out, so fast it's rapid, tripping over itself. Alana Bloom feels her cheeks burn a hot pink for a moment, eyes hopelessly bright, "I keep thinking about the possibility of this going wrong. I know it's not right. To plunge myself into that kind of negativity. But I can't help but feel afraid I'll fail you the way everyone else has failed you, and I couldn't bear being the one who--"  
  
"Shh."  
  
The sound is quick, insistent. It cuts the air like a knife. In surprise, Alana comes to a sudden halt. She looks up, expectant. She may as well be gazing at the soft glow of a full moon.  
  
"Do you know what it is you give me by even trying...?" Margot who has never had anyone step miles out of line for her and yet, Alana's hands are forever stained, and everyone knows the knife buried to the hilt inside of her.  
  
At the truth of herself, at the core of who she is, Alana is not a violent person, not vicious. Everyone hears the nightmares. The cold sweat that jostles her at the memory of Mason, the awful dreams that churn up. Dinner tables full of festering maggots and rotting meat, ornamented by the skulls of dead beasts, a face cut unnaturally clean as though carved of glass and marble, a jaw full of needle-teeth shredding her flesh in devouring mouthfuls to silent screams that jar Alana awake to such great shaking in the single digits of the morning. Alana who wakes and thrashes and gasps herself breathless until Margot has to hold her still. If she strokes her hair for long enough, the shuddering, the sobs usually quiet. It's a fifty-fifty chance whether or not she'll be sick afterward, but those soft cheeks are always slick with tears, and Alana chokes on words for at least ten minutes. When she regains composure those nights, she clings to Margot in a death grip.  
  
Hannibal, even buried deep in the annals of the BSHCI, sets up house more readily in shadows to Alana Bloom than he does in a cell.  
  
"You couldn't fail me, Alana. Most people I know have failed me. Your courage lies in your desire not to," Margot's voice takes on the only other tone it knows, the only time it's successful in fluctuation of truth. The same voice she used to soothe a spooked mare, "Your trying is a success in itself."

* * *

 

Margot Verger did not understand fairytales as a child.  
  
She had always wondered, even at an early age, exactly what it meant. It felt like a piece of a puzzle that didn’t fit, like trying to cram a jigsaw into a place that doesn’t make sense. She’d listened to her mother, distant, whenever possible, whenever present, even though it was so rare, tell her vague half-stories about Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty or Belle.  
  
She didn’t understand them. The overwhelming, delighted flush of being rescued by your prince.The shocking glee of such a revelation. She didn’t like the idea of being rescued, she didn’t want to be saved.  
  
Reservations had lurked clear until the last. Maybe not on the surface but sometimes one would pass just beneath her skin. Alana would lie sleeping beside her, uncharacteristically innocent, and Margot would shake off a thought, unbidden. How this shockingly brilliant woman could find some small way to literally rip their fortune out from under them.  
  
She hadn’t truly assumed Alana would go through with it. Or, she had, but the undeniable churning in her gut refused to allow it. She’d back out at the last minute. When Mason told her about the surrogate, the thrill eclipsing the swell of doubt that seemed to almost replace where that infant had been inside her, she’d taken Alana’s hands when she spoke.  
  
She’d looked into her eyes and seen something that looks like one part fear and one part hope.  
  
With Alana, Margot had begun to understand, then, the fear always outweighed. She took nothing for face-value. If Margot’s quiet sense that nothing would go right was a borderline animalistic idea, Alana’s was something woven so far into her through classical conditioning she was often surprised the psychiatrist had chosen to pursue this courtship to begin with.  
  
She’d told Alana Mason had a surrogate, and between them no one could have predicted the ways you can break two people.  
  
Margot had never understood fairytales as a child. They didn’t make sense to her— the princess up in a tower, waiting for her prince, and her prince riding in, dashing, handsome. She’d never even wanted a prince.  
  
She’d never known how they worked, what it was.  
  
Not until Mason dragged her underwater, the uselessness of his failing limbs sinking her like a shipwreck. She was sure she was dead, then, and she’d fight him to her last gasp how she always had. She was sure, then, with the water closing in around her, with the sharp, accidental inhale, flailing for wherever the eel might be, Alana had done it. She’d betrayed it, been through with it. For a second of doubt, Margot was convinced she’d lost it all.  
  
She knew, now, what a fairytale was.  
  
She knew, suddenly, how a prince could rescue you when she saw the brief glint of cherry red nail polish and a surprisingly strong set of arms ripped her from the watery grave Mason was floating toward.  
  
She’d felt Alana take her hand, then, and she clasped their fingers tight as they held him under, flopping like a fish struggling against a hook, choking on the eel forcing down his throat.  
  
She understood fairytales just then, in a moment least romantic, most morbid, still coughing up aquarium water.  
  
She just hadn’t known her prince was a woman in a fashionably tailored suit, and it made sense when she thought about it.  
  
Even killing her brother Margot thought Alana had the kindest blue eyes she’d ever seen.

* * *

 

The lilacs in the spring are a soft purple that Alana says remind her of baby toys, and with hr hand on the swell of a very pregnant Alana, Margot says they’ll have no shortage of those, and they don’t. The nursery is already jam packed with stuffed animals of all shapes and sizes, of all colors. The walls are painted a series of panels that bleed into one another. The flowers dance in the breeze, and Margot drops a tender kiss to Alana’s temple and thinks she’s never looked like the handsome prince more than she does in that moment, if the handsome prince were to have their son. The former therapist’s tendency to keep a hand pressed to her belly is almost paranoid. She likes to remember the child is there, and sometimes he kicks her palm. Alana’s surprised every time.  
  
  
“Do you think he’ll like it?”  
  
The question is a broad stroke of Margot’s imagination. She can almost see a vibrant little boy, imagines him fearfully with Mason’s butcher blue eyes and a shock of blonde hair, forces herself to twist the idea. A little boy with Alana’s gently, kind eyes, such a clea blue they’re frozen, her dark curls. In her favorite fantasies there is no trace of her brother in their son. Alana swears there won’t be and, at least in attitude, Margot believes her. Mason’s damage was not genetic, and this boy will only know love.  
  
Margot thinks often of the son she lost. Sometimes, she remembers Alana drinking more than she could ever hold, and she remembers it’s a ‘they’ and not necessarily a ‘she’. She wonders if Alana thinks about him, too, and she knows she does, quietly.  
  
She admitted once she didn’t feel entitled to mourn that loss. It hadn’t been her child but in name for a few hours. But Alana will never say that cutting open that sow and holding the lifeless infant in her arms had felt as close to true loss as anything ever could. Neither of her parents’  deaths had hit Alana quite so hard. She didn’t mourn aloud, and she never will. It’s not in her nature. She couldn’t mourn, not holding Margot as she wept, black mascara trickling down her arms. This was not her death to mourn.  
  
Alana holds onto it silently, like a memory. She wonders if it would’ve been different.  
  
“Here? I think he’ll grow up in a fairytale castle like no one’s ever seen. He’ll love it. He’ll learn all the best hiding spots and the secret places. He’ll get everyone who works here to love him. We’ll love him, too. So much he’ll get sick of it. He’ll adore it. The home his mother gave him.”  
  
“And his mama,” Margot corrects, voice full, very calm.  
  
Alana ducks her head in some temporary shyness for just a moment, mildly embarrassed. It’s been complicated, as far as pregnancies go. She’s trying, as clearly and seriously as she can. She doesn’t always succeed.  
  
“We’re going to be happy, aren’t we?”  
  
Alana sounds so hopeful, the sound of it could break a heart.  
  
“We already are.”  
  
Margot sounds as pleased as she ever has, and Alana has learned to be unquestioning. Margot smiles, enigmatic and small, that smile that is Alana’s only to lock away as a keepsake.  
  
“We will be so happy you’ll be sick of it.”

Margot's declaration is so lofty Alana could believe the sky purple in the firmness of her tone.

* * *

 

They don’t get married until their son is two, because it’s so important to them they want him to share it. And boy, does he share it. Rosy-cheeked, ecstatic, Edward Bloom (the second, for Alana’s younger brother, whom Margot gets along with so well they’ve both gotten utterly smashed together and Alana has taken a candid photo of him asleep on her girlfriend _no soon to be her wife’s_ shoulder, _drooling)_ toddles down the aisle, shiny little rings on a velvet pillow clutched to his chest.  
  
Alana wears the handsomest tuxedo she’s ever seen, standing there waiting, her hair pinned up in an elegant chignon, a diamond ornament sparkling bright in soft inky waves. There’s gold cufflinks flashing at her wrists and they wink when her hands fidget, strangely ungloved, a thing even Margot feels startled to see around anyone apart from herself and their son.  
  
It’s the smallest ceremony conceivable. Margot’s in some exquisite black lace gown and her eyes are the rarest green, sea-glass, jewels so clear nothing she ever owns could be half as bright. When Alana turns to see her, those baby blues blow wide, and her mouth, oh her mouth, the smile it breaks into explodes so slow that the tears gathering at the corners of her eyes drop like hard crystals. She doesn’t try to turn away, but the laugh that bubbles out of her is a gleeful giggle. She doesn't try to hide that, either. And it’s a true testament to Alana’s self, the very soul of her, when she raises a hand to wave at Margot as though there aren’t mere feet between them down the wedding aisle.  
  
Margot’s surprised to find when she lays her gaze on their eagerly fidgeting little boy she tears up a little, too, the understated curve of her mouth a clear uptick. He’s wearing a little tux just like his father, which Alana has become, somehow, in two years, when the word mama doesn’t suit. It does and it doesn’t, but mostly dad feels more right than anything else ever did.  
  
Eddie waves, too, because after Alana does it, he thinks it’s what he’s supposed to do.  
  
There will be no Will Graham here, no Hannibal Lecter, no hideous memory of the two neither Margot nor Alana can find it in them to think on, not now. No ghosts will preside at this wedding. They will be left to the dust where they belong, the forgotten carcasses of what Alana and Margot have worked so hard to leave behind. They think of the lost boy often, the son they never got to hear cry, but Eddie wails every single time he steps on Applesauce’s tail and he’s alive, breathing, and he has Alana’s kind, warm blue eyes, a color that people will think is trusting.  
  
Margot thinks they’re the kindest eyes she’s ever seen. She knows they’ve only ever looked at her with all the love in the world.  
  
You’re not supposed to kiss the bride before the _I do._  
  
Alana can’t help herself.


End file.
